Summary: How NASA Builds Teams

Review and Analysis of Pellerin's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9782806246769
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

The must-read summary of Charles J. Pellerin's book: `How NASA Builds Teams: Mission Critical Soft Skills for Scientists, Engineers, and Project Teams`.

This complete summary of the ideas from Charles J. Pellerin's book `How NASA Builds Teams` shows that team building must take account of the personalities and expertise of the individual members. Scientists and technical experts often respond to a different type of team building to arts people. Through a great deal of trial and error, NASA has developed the 4-D team building strategy, which has proved very successful. 4-D can also be applied to leadership training. Every team must be Cultivating (so that everyone is feeling appreciated), Including, Visioning (everyone must think about the team’s future) and Directing (willing to take action to further the team’s success). This summary explains how the system used by NASA (an organisation with massively high stakes, both in terms of human life and money) can be applied to any organisation.

Added-value of this summary: 
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To learn more, read `How NASA Builds Teams` and discover the key to building the best teams.

Summary of How Nasa Builds Teams (Charles J. Pellerin)

1. The basics of the 4-D system

The 4-D system simplifies leadership into the four dimensions you must address and balance to be an effective leader:

1. Cultivating – you have to make everyone feel appreciated.
2. Including – you must make people’s opinions count.
3. Visioning – you have to think about possible futures.
4. Directing – you have to take action to make things happen.

Not only can 4-D be used to build good leaders but it is also a solid team-building process. It measures the key driver of team performance – the social context.

“I am convinced that half the cost of a project is socially determined.”

– John Mather, NASA Nobel Laureate in physics

The Hubble Space Telescope cost NASA 15 years of work and $1.7 billion of taxpayer money to put into space in 1980. Yet it wasn’t until the Hubble was in orbit that it was discovered the telescope’s mirror had a spherical aberration – making it unable to be used for what it had been designed for in the first place. When a Failure Review Board analyzed how this problem arose, it was determined the aberration was caused by a misadjusted null corrector manufactured by a contractor. What was worse, however, was there had been hints of the mirror flaw in some tests but smart technical people have not pursued these hints rigorously enough to uncover the underlying problem.

This illustrated the point technical workers often focus so intensively on the task at hand they fail to notice or manage the larger social context within which their technology is required to operate. This is the mental equivalent of concentrating so hard on climbing the ladder nobody has stopped to ponder whether the ladder is standing by the right wall. Social context always plays a large role in how projects turn out:

• In one well-known study by Wilson and Kelling in 1982, they showed crime increases in rental buildings in New York when no one repairs broken windows. Unrepaired windows create a context where people assume nobody cares and therefore crime increases. This led to a massive experiment where crime on New York subways was lowered by removing graffiti and arresting fare jumpers.
• Many of the best and brightest people who serve as project heads at NASA and other aerospace industry projects have authority over multi-billion-dollar budgets and yet expect top management to fire them within two years or less. They believe cost overruns are inevitable and when they have to make those cost overruns known, they will be fired for what they are reporting.
• In the Hubble case, it was found NASA program managers openly criticized and pressured the contractors to meet tight delivery and cost budgets. As a result, the contractors felt they could not report delays or problems in what they were working on. They therefore responded by using guerilla tactics including withholding troubling information. This ultimately led the review board to conclude the problem with the Hubble Space Telescope was a failure of leadership more than anything else.

In order for context to be understood, measured and therefore managed better, a simple tool was required which could be used to analyze the performance of teams and leaders.

The 4-D system uses an X-Y coordinate system to simplify teams and leaders in this way:

By combining this X-axis and Y-axis together, you come up with a two-by-two matrix which represents the four core elements or dimensions of leaders and high performance teams:

The four dimensions are:

Cultivating (emotional, intuited) embraces deep feelings for an idealized world. Actions in this dimension are concerned with addressing the interests of others and making them feel understood and appreciated.

Including (emotional, sensed) is about building relationships with others. Actions in this dimension focuses on making others feel like they are part of a team and injecting inte...